Great book covering the data and backend landscape. I’m mostly reading technical books these days to deepen my knowledge in tools and concepts that i’m using or plan to use at work. Because of that, technical utility varied based on the chapter for me. Right now i’m working in a serverless and nosql environment, and this book goes very deep into topics that are just not applicable to my work right now.
That’s okay though, because if I’ve learned anything from my decade building software, it’s that I’m always learning new things and you never know what will come up again. I guess you could say this book turned unknown unknowns into known unknowns, so that now if I come across something that I might have skimmed over, like protocol buffers or some consensus algorithm, i’ll remember that it was in this book and can go revisit it. This is made infinitely more useful because this book has the most impressive set of footnotes/references I’ve ever seen. Every chapter is absolutely loaded with links to other books, articles, and whitepapers. Seriously, most chapters have over 100 references.
All in all, I didn’t come away from this book with something specific to apply to my work, but this feels like a foundational text that gives a survey of the backend landscape and I would recommend it highly. This is a book i’m sure to revisit because I’ve probably only extracted 1% of the value that it holds.